;'? THE -ru . :: ... . //1 11\" II U, II ,- - '- J '-..- rP :: ...:: no /J"\ \ . . \ , ' 0 0 ..*. . . · 0 ), . .,.. "" THE TALI( OF THE TOWN .LV otes a1zd C omme1zt I N one's childhood and early youth, heroes are likely to be twice or even three times one's age, but we have notIced that as we grow older we tend to choose for heroes men of about the same age as ourself. Or else we favor heroes who have made good compara- tively late in life-men, at any rate, who have come to fame so tardily that they must have supposed that that last infirmitJ of noble mind had long since passed them hy. One of these late- blooming heroes of ours, a marathon runner named Charlie Hart, died in London the other day. Charlie was eighty-se\ en, and our sorrow over his death was somewhat mitigated by thè fact that, being so old, he couldn't have had many marathons left in him. Oh, not that he wa" raced out! Only last year, according to his obituary in the Times, Charlie ran eight miles in the creditable time of a hundred and two minutes, and at the age of eighty-four, to win a thirty-two-dollar wager, he raced a coach-and-four from "'Tindsor to Twickenham Green, and beat it by two minutes. Nevertheless, his great track days were some decades behind him. The Times estimated that he had won five hundred long-distance races 'lnd had run a total of seven hundl ed and fifty thousand miles, but from our point of view the significant thing about Charlie is that he didn't be- come famous until he was forty-seven- for a track man, a prodigious age at which to be sprinting into the headlines. "',That Charlie did to gain immortality was run non-stop from Brighton to London and back again, a distance of a hundred and fifty-four miles. For- tune's darling after that? Well, we should hope so' The Times went on to mention the occasion, in 1925, when Charlie com- peted against a couple of mettlesome race horses. The horses were two-year- olds and Charlie was a fifty-eight-year- old, and he raced them for eleven hours a day for six days and beat them by eight miles. Three years afterward, he came to this country, and entered and won nobody knows how many of those mara- thon-dance contests that were all the rage in the twenties. In one of them, held at Long Beach, California, Charlie danced fur a thousand and sixty-two hours without stopping, which he claimed was a world's record for con- tInuous ballroom dancing, and we wouldn't be surprised if he was right. Later, he took part in a transcontinental marathon from Los Angeles to New York, but threw a shoe in Chillicothe, Ohio, or suffered some similar misfor- tune, and lost the race; nothing daunted, he returned to England and walked twelve hundred and fifty miles in a thousand hours. C HARLIE'S obituary is just about the cheerfulest we've ever read. From first to last, he appears to have had a glorious time in life, and we forgive hIm posthumously for having done what every octogenarian does, which is to give the world the secret of longevity . To the total abstainer, it is total abstinence; to the pipe smoker, it is pipe smoking; and to Charlie, who probably never sat still a moment of all his eighty-seven years, it was, of course, exerCIse. We, who spend much of our day sitting per- fectly still in front of a perfectly still typewriter, assume that Charlie was wrong, but that doesn't cause us to ad- mire him less. A privilege of age is that one isn't obliged to imitate what one ad- mires. We wouldn't dream of jogging out to Patchogue and back non-stop, and if it came to a race for money be- tween a horse înd us, we'd hand the purse to the horse and take a taxi home. The Times doesn't say so, but we wouldn't put it past Charlie to have been doing pushups on his deathbed. As for Heaven, where ever)'thing is long-dis- tance and non-stop, It should suit Charlie fine. Burden T HAT vexatious old hobgoblin Karl Marx has thirteen living descendants, all French. One of theIn, Robert Jean Longuet, a lawyer in Paris, is fond of this country and comes over here as often as possible to gather what he calls "freshening ideas" J lIst before he returned home from one of these cerebral holidays, we had a talk wIth him, in the course of which , f we clambered up and down his family tree, acquired considerable l\Ilarxian domestic lore, and got some notion of what it feels like to be a great-grand- son of the man who, though he died in 1883, has done more than any other SIn- gle figure to turn the modern world into armed camps. The eldest son of the eldest son of Marx's eldest daughter, and, as such, the present chef dr famillr, M. Longuet is fifty-two, has an over- hanging brow and bent, slender shoul- ders, is gentle in manner, and, as far as he knows, bears lIttle resemblance to hIs portentous ancestor. M. Longuet told us that his grand- father Charles Longuet was also a law- yer in Paris. A .firm believer in the French Repuhlic, Charles strongly dis- approved of the setting up of an empire by Napoleon III in 1852 and used llluch of his patrimony to found an opposition newspaper, La Rzve Gauche, to which Victor Hugo, among others, contrib-